Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Some of the new ways of living also had to do with the location of her city. After a period of decline for riverports, they were flourishing again. There had been a time without any shipping at all; the rivers on the entire continent deserted. But now the waterways were serving as the most modern traffic and transportation arteries, and the cities located on them were becoming hubs as never before in history, even during the Roman Empire. And her own city, at the confluence of two rivers, formed something like the hub of hubs. A financial center like Augsburg in the Fuggers’ day, especially in the time of the family patriarch, Jakob — but less because of its wealth than because of the sheer volume of wheeling and dealing. A life like this, on and between two world-famous and commercially significant rivers, imbued the inhabitants, and the new arrivals more powerfully than the longtime residents, with a particular sense of place: stamped with self-confidence or even pride, quite different from that of the residents of New York or some other great metropolis by the sea, an inlander’s pride, so to speak.

Part of it was that the rivers and their characteristic surroundings were increasingly shaping everyday life, were gradually permeating it almost to the exclusion of everything else. In the market stalls you could still see all the varieties of saltwater fish laid out. But the point was that these were “laid out,” dead or half-dead, whereas the freshwater fish “cavorted” in glass tanks nearby; even if there were not quite so many varieties, each individual exemplar was almost a species unto itself, and not only because it was so palpably alive, leaping about amid the throng of other fishes. For many years out of style, they were now increasingly prized, purchased, and prepared according to the old recipes, and even more according to new ones, were a component of the daily regional cuisine (“regional” having become no less important than “national”).

Similarly the old orchards and the vegetable gardens or fields or terraces along both rivers, which had long been left fallow, now, wherever they had not been turned into building lots, were experiencing a second spring — summer — fall. The varieties once planted there were being supplemented and enriched by imported varieties or varieties moving on their own into the area as a result of the abrupt warming of the climate all over the continent. Of course exotic fruits, as well as olives, wine grapes, pistachios, and such, continued to be imported into this northwestern region. But in the meantime it had become customary — this, too, part of the new way of living — that once the locally grown crops had been sold, used up, consumed, no substitutes were flown in from another hemisphere. No more fresh cherries or blueberries from Chile in the winter. No more early fall apples from New Zealand in the spring. No more cepes from South Africa with lamb at Eastertime. And in her two-river city, the ripening of the local fruits, rather than being accelerated, was actually held back.

And soon hardly anyone missed such luxuries. Now the very absence of a familiar vegetable, an accustomed fruit, imposed a rhythm on the year; this periodic absence could add a kind of zest. New ways of living? The return or recovery of the old ways? (Though without folk costumes, customs, songs and dances.) What a historian had characterized as the phenomenon of “cultural continuity,” the most reliable rhythmic recurrence in history, indestructible (or was it really, over time)? Be that as it might: how the old varieties of apples, now brought back, stood out from the interlopers, on the trees, in the orchards, but also under the artificial lights of the huge warehouse-style supermarkets. How they gleamed, how fragrant they were, and this was no humbug. Or was she the only one who noticed, with her eyes and nose from childhood, from her Sorbian village?

On the other hand, it was not she who created the demand, and with it the return of the continuity phenomenon, but rather her odd, evasive neighborhood. And equally odd her sense of being at home there. She knew, after all (had experienced), that it took only a tiny jolt, a phrase picked up in passing, and one would tip from presumed continuity into an isolated moment, not historical in the slightest but torn out of any temporal sequence, into a unique instant of complete isolation.

She had many enemies. And she had made almost all her enemies through her work. And they were far away. But one enemy was stirring things up in her vicinity; nearby. It had begun as love. At least this was the word the man used, the moment they met, or the second moment. They ran into each other in a clearing deep in the woods. She entered the clearing on a corduroy road whose logs were already half-rotted. Without warning, the image of a deserted beer garden, shaded by chestnut trees, in the hills above Trieste on a midsummer morning came to her, and she spread her arms. Just then the man slipped out of the dense underbrush on the edge of the clearing and was right next to her. She did not start. Perhaps she would have jumped under any other circumstances, but with the image present nothing could harm her. It was out of the question that anything should affect her. So she stood there, arms still spread, and even smiled at the stranger. It was a spring evening, long before dark.

It was the man who uttered the word. Was he a foreigner? For he spoke the word with an accent. The majority of those living in the area were foreigners. Or did his excitement act as an accent-generator and tongue-twister? His outfit resembled that of an escaped prisoner, not because of the fabric or the cut, but because of all the rips (along with his disheveled hair), probably from his running through the woods. And he did not say, “I love you,” and so on, but rather, “You must love me. You are going to love me.” And continued at once, stammering, “You need me. You have been waiting a long time for me. Without me, you are done for. I will save you. You will not have loved me in vain.”

She kept silent. Only her eyes gleamed, thanks to the persisting image, which it was up to her to intensify. In the center of the chestnut-shaded garden stood a limestone column, damp from the night’s rain, a stalagmite. Water spewed from an iron pipe. An espresso machine hissed. And in the darkening clearing a gentle wind now sprang up. The man resumed: “Listen to me! Listen, I say. In the end, God, too, for whom the prophet Elijah, or which prophet was it? waited so long in the desert, did not come either in lightning or thunder or in the whirlwind, but in the softest, barely audible rustling.” He advanced a step toward her, but then, on the recoil, dove back into the bushes. His nose had been bleeding, and the white handkerchief he had dropped in the grass of the clearing revealed a red, many-eyed, checkered pattern.

Next to that tavern in the hills — not a single guest — the Paris — Moscow express stood waiting; the place was a border-crossing point. The windows of the sleeping car were open; empty berths; through the windows on the other side the bare white limestone cliffs were visible. Didn’t the stranger know that the god who had made himself heard in the rustling breeze was an Old Testament god? That his voice in that gentle whirring was not whispering about love but was filled with wrath? That that god wanted vengeance, vengeance, and more vengeance?

After such a beginning, it came as no surprise that the man soon found out where she lived; and that his voice was heard over the intercom around midnight: “In all these years here I never set foot in that clearing — and then to find you there. It was a sign: you love me. And although I had never met you in the flesh, I recognized you instantly. If that isn’t a sign, what is? And the third sign: whenever I come to an unfamiliar place, I look straight ahead and pass through it without looking to right or left — but this time I looked to the side at once, to where you were standing, waiting for me. Unlock the door. You must let me in.”